


Sunbeam Flaring

by Deepdarkwaters



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: Christmas, Hair Kink, Hair-pulling, Kissing, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-27
Updated: 2016-12-27
Packaged: 2018-09-12 16:14:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9080059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/pseuds/Deepdarkwaters
Summary: His hair's grown out a little since he had it cut that time in Lisbon, falling in untidy clumps over his forehead. It feels a strange combination of crunchy and greasy under Harry's fingertips when he reaches out to touch it, smoothing the sweaty strands backwards. "You need to wash this," Harry murmurs after twenty minutes of stroking, accustomed by now to talking to unconscious people and no longer embarrassed by the urge. "Filthy. Dust and sweat and god only knows what all grimed into it. I've half a mind to fetch a bowl of water and a bottle of shampoo and see to you myself.""Alright," Eggsy says, sounding parched and sleepy and sort of like he's smiling a bit, even though all that shows of it is a quick little flicker at the corner of his dry lips. "That coconut shit you use sometimes. You smell like a Malibu and coke, you fucking disgrace."





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [withinmelove](https://archiveofourown.org/users/withinmelove/gifts).



> Dear withinmelove - I jumped on your hair porn prompt like it was a gd trampoline :D Thank you for the excuse to write my favourite thing! Hope you've had a lovely holiday.

"Merlin says you're a bad influence on me," Eggsy says when he strolls into the hotel room four minutes later than scheduled. He sounds pleased, like he's finding a compliment somewhere in the middle of what Merlin surely intended as exasperation. "Asked me if I need help figuring out what the big hand means and what the little hand means on my watch."

"Do you?" Harry asks distractedly, too busy sorting through his box of cufflinks trying to find the pair with hidden compartments for stolen microchips to look up for a moment. When he finally does, he finds Eggsy casually perched on the arm of the couch like something from an Italian fashion magazine, flawlessly cut midnight blue suit clinging to and skimming over all the right places. He's peering critically at his reflection in the huge gilt-framed mirror, poking at his hair and only making it messier. "Eggsy, what the bloody hell have you done to yourself?"

"Rox said I looked like I been dragged through a hedge and I need my hair cutting." He tugs on a strand at the front, frowns, goes cross-eyed trying to see it but it's too short. "Just made it fucking worse, shoulda left it like it was."

"No, she was absolutely right, you were starting to get curtains like a boyband from the nineties."

"You gotta tell me more about how you know so much about boybands from the nineties," Eggsy says, laughing, but he shuts up when Harry abandons his cufflinks and comes to stand in front of him. "What--"

"Hands down, you're not helping." He smacks Eggsy's fingers away and uses his own like a comb, dragging through the artfully mussed strands - good lord, has this hack barber actually used _mousse_? - and flattening them where they need, guiding a new, neater parting at the side with his fingernail, smoothing the stubborn curls that curve and cling around the back of Eggsy's ears where the arms of his glasses rest. Five and a half decades of struggling with hair that people - admiringly or otherwise - have compared to candyfloss and clouds and a grumpy angora rabbit has given him a very specific talent for this sort of thing, and in less than a minute Eggsy's just about presentable. "There," Harry says, checking him over and making a few final adjustments, tidying the hairline with a gentle sweep of his fingertips. "Now you look like a Kingsman again."

"Errm," Eggsy says. "Okay." He sounds for some reason like he's choking and Harry takes a step back so he can see him properly, slightly baffled at how wide his eyes are.

"Everything alright?"

"Yep. Ready to go? I'm ready. Let's go. Yeah. Mission time!"

He whirls around abruptly to fling his case open and select his guns with rather more fuss and noise than is necessary, really.

Thirteen hundred miles away in Hampshire, Merlin sighs in Harry's earpiece.

 _What?_ Harry signs in front of his glasses.

"Oh dear," Merlin says, in the gleeful, evil tone of voice he usually reserves for talking about throwing recruits out of planes without parachutes. "Now you've done it."

_Done what?_

Merlin just laughs like a pantomime villain so Harry puts him on mute, not in the mood for it, and goes back to his cufflinks.

 

* * *

 

It's not the first time Eggsy's been injured on a mission, but it's the first time he's been knocked unconscious. Harry wasn't with him this time, working on his own solo mission at the other end of the continent, so now he finds himself pacing the corridor outside Eggsy's HQ hospital room like an expectant father banned from the labour room for stressing everyone out, helplessly wondering whether he might have been able to do something had he been there. Stupid, really. People can't be everywhere at once, certain missions need agents working alone, injuries are expected in this sort of career - but knowing the facts doesn't make them any easier to accept sometimes, so he just carries on pacing, chewing distractedly at his fingernails in a way he's not done in years, until the doctor stops making notes on her clipboard and gestures with an infuriatingly knowing sort of look for Harry to go in as she's on her way out.

"No lasting damage," she tells him. "He'll wake up soon with what feels like a mild hangover, but that's it. Merlin's got the team working on recreating the knockout gas from the residue on his swabs, it's a lot stronger than ours. Useful addition to the arsenal if they can manage it."

It had been so easy to dream up all sorts of horrific nightmarish injuries on his dash home once he'd wrapped up his own mission - Eggsy with his face scraped off or missing a limb or two or splayed open like a spatchcocked chicken - but in fact he looks just like he's sleeping. Which, technically, he is. His face is peaceful, not a single bruise or speck of blood. He looks younger without his glasses, strangely fragile even though the muscles in his arms are clearly visible stretching the sleeves of the too-small pyjama shirt someone's put on him. He sleeps badly a lot of the time - you don't take double missions with someone and share their space for nights on end without learning all sorts of things about them, finding out new things you've got in common, sitting up until four in the morning carefully testing how much you can talk about before things begin to feel awkward and far too intimate - so in some strange way perhaps this incident actually has a silver lining.

Harry's still restless and uncomfortable as he takes the seat by Eggsy's head. It's not the same, it's not even close, but he can't help remembering his aversion to enforced sleep while he was recovering from being shot, all the unfortunate medical staff he'd yelled at in a panic whenever they mentioned general anaesthetic or sleeping pills because the thought of feeling his body unable to fight off outside influences again was enough to throw him right back into that church in Kentucky, surrounded by fifty brutally slaughtered corpses. Merlin could calm him - after thirty years of the man's quiet, capable voice in his ear, Harry reacted to him just as instantly as he would to a tranquiliser - but Merlin was running the place now and couldn't always spare the time to lurk around the hospital waiting for Harry's heart to climb down from his throat. Instead, Eggsy had been the one to sit with him as often as he could: telling fond stories about what sort of trouble JB was getting himself into or the new words his baby sister was learning every day, showing Harry stupid pictures he found on Facebook and trying in vain to explain the concept of memes, reading to him from the newspapers and Harry's guilty pleasure gossip magazines, sometimes just sitting there beside him and sharing the silence to make it feel less suffocating. He got into the habit of holding Harry's hand any time he had to be knocked out for another operation, leaning over to make sure the last thing Harry saw before he fell unconscious was a familiar face, and always, always being there when he woke up. _Been here the whole time_ , he said, and even when that was blatantly untrue, when he'd changed his clothes or shaved off his stubble the meantime, it didn't matter - all the parts that mattered were was still real, and the in between times of losing control slowly began to feel easier to bear.

His hair's grown out a little since he had it cut that time in Lisbon, falling in untidy clumps over his forehead. It feels a strange combination of crunchy and greasy under Harry's fingertips when he reaches out to touch it, smoothing the sweaty strands backwards. "You need to wash this," Harry murmurs after twenty minutes of stroking, accustomed by now to talking to unconscious people and no longer embarrassed by the urge. "Filthy. Dust and sweat and god only knows what all grimed into it. I've half a mind to fetch a bowl of water and a bottle of shampoo and see to you myself."

"Alright," Eggsy says, sounding parched and sleepy and sort of like he's smiling a bit, even though all that shows of it is a quick little flicker at the corner of his dry lips. "That coconut shit you use sometimes. You smell like a Malibu and coke, you fucking disgrace."

Harry had stopped on hearing Eggsy's voice, vagely panicked by the thought that _this is hideously inappropriate_ , but he begins to move again now, gently sliding his fingers over Eggsy's scalp and drawing four thick furrows through his mission-dirty hair. Eggsy makes a whisper of a noise in his throat, wordless and wanting, inflected like he's saying _please_ , so Harry doesn't stop even as he's awkwardly pouring a glass of water and holding the straw to Eggsy's mouth for him to sip. Doesn't stop even after half an hour when he sees Merlin's face appear in the little window in the door and give him an eyebrows-raised, amused sort of look. _Fuck off_ , Harry mouths silently, even though Eggsy's eyes are still closed and it's possible he's fallen asleep again, and Merlin dutifully fucks off - but he can't resist sending a text two minutes later that contains nothing but a link to the "Midlife crisis" Wikipedia page and a crying laughing emoji.

 

* * *

 

Their days off don't always overlap, but this time they do, and Eggsy shows up on Harry's doorstep three days before Christmas with an elf hat on his head and a lunchbox full of slightly burned mince pies.

"Mum and Daisy been cooking," he explains, shoving the box at Harry to push him out of the doorway far enough to step inside. "They look rank but they're pretty good. Can't go wrong with mince pies, hey. Daisy made you this and all," he adds as he's toeing off his trainers, finding something in his jacket pocket and holding it out - a Father Christmas made of red crepe paper and cotton wool and plastic googly eyes messily glued to a toilet roll tube, very slightly squashed. "For your tree."

"I haven't got a tree," Harry says, and Eggsy stares at him like he just shat on his granny's grave.

"You fucking what?"

"Haven't got a tree."

"Harry, fucksake, have a word with yourself, yeah? It's _Christmas_."

"But--"

Eggsy cuts him off with a stubborn expression, a hand rudely thrust palm-first into his face, and, after a quick few taps on his phone, Wizzard blaring from his Spotify app. "Just fucking put the kettle on, alright? I'll sort it."

Before the kettle's even stopped boiling, Eggsy's raided the toolbox in the under stairs cupboard and come out with a handful of nails, a hammer, a roll of green garden twine, and some leftover fencing panels from the back yard. He works some kind of mysterious festive magic with all his findings, the bells on his elf hat jingling with every nail he hammers into the wood, winding the twine around and around until there's a criss-crossing pattern of green in the shape of a tree and the toilet-roll Santa crucified on top. Santa's googly eyes swing madly around in circles with the motion as Eggsy takes down the Hogarth engraving above the fireplace and hangs his creation there instead.

"I'm Picasso," he says proudly, and necks his cooling cup of tea. "Seen it on Roxy's Pinterest. Christmas tree for Scroogey fuckers who can't be arsed hoovering up needles from a real one."

"Come here," Harry demands, because enough now, he's not fucking made of granite. Eggsy grins, more like a smirk, and saunters a step or two closer to Harry's place on the couch.

"Yeah?"

"Sit."

Eggsy sits where Harry points, jingling all the way until Harry snatches the hat off his head and throws it somewhere. His hair tries to follow it, sticking up in every direction like a stupid fluffy golden lovely halo, until Harry slides his fingers through it, clenches his fist, and _tugs_.

"Oh," Eggsy says, pronouncing it carefully as though it's a real word as he follows the insistent pulling. He ends up lying with his head in Harry's lap, cheeks starting to flush a glorious, gorgeous shade of pink, staring up in extremely gratifying wonder at Harry's face. "Harry."

"Yes?"

"I got goosebumps."

Harry can see them, a rushing flood of them raising all the hairs on Eggsy's bare tanned forearms. "Good," he says, tracing a line with two fingertips from Eggsy's crown down to his nape and resting there, drawing tiny gentle little circles at the place where his hair ends. Eggsy makes a stunned little sound, rolling farther onto his side and pressing his nose against Harry's hip so when he speaks again it sounds muffled and Harry can feel the warmth of it spreading through his skin and setting off a whole fleet of butterflies in his stomach.

"Don't stop. Don't."

"I won't."

"Please. Harry."

"I won't," Harry tells him, a reassuring quiet little crooning murmur that makes Eggsy wriggle delightedly against the cushion he's holding on his belly like a velvet-upholstered teddy bear. He begins stroking upwards again, fingers thrusting against the nap of Eggsy's cropped hair and into the longer strands on top, twisting and tugging, stroking, scratching gently with his fingernails until Eggsy's slumped boneless against him, breathing hard, one hand draped carelessly over Harry's knee and the other clenched fitfully in the front of his cardigan and pulling the knit stitches all out of shape.

"Harry."

He strokes the mess of hair back from Eggsy's hot forehead again, trying to find his eyes although they're squeezed shut when he does. "What do you need?"

"Oh my god you can't just fucking ask me that."

Slowly around the back of his ears again, down to find that spot he seemed to like so much on his nape, and Eggsy presses frantically back against him like a needy cat. "Why?"

"Gonna nut in my jeans like a fucking loser if you do."

"And I haven't even bought you dinner yet. What sort of a dreadful suitor am I?"

"Suitor," Eggsy repeats, and does an undignified and slightly hysterical sort of snort-laugh that Harry can feel through the hip of his trousers where Eggsy's wet mouth is still pressed. "That like a tailor?"

"You know precisely what I mean."

It's the first time in ages that he sees Eggsy's face, twisting to peek up at him sideways with a beautiful jumble of emotions all fighting for prominence in his glinting, laughing eyes. "You bought me dinner loads of times. We're cool."

"Is that what we are. You're looking a little too flushed in the face to be called cool."

"Shut the fuck up."

"Why don't you come up here," Harry says softly, clenching his fingers in Eggsy's hair again and starting to pull, "and say that to my face?"

"I'll come up"--Eggsy scrambles to get his knees under himself and one swung across Harry's thighs--"but I ain't talking if that's alright with you."

He can feel Eggsy's cock pressing hard as hell and twice as hot against his belly; his own is slower to rouse these days but happily on its way, sending shivery tingles up his spine and down all his limbs as Eggsy wriggles in his lap and laughs, breathless, when he finds it. He tilts his face to find Harry's, foreheads touching, the sides of their noses bumping, exhalations mingling damp and warm in the three atoms' breadth between their mouths.

"You gonna kiss me?" Eggsy asks softly. He's so close that his lip brushes Harry's when he speaks - not a kiss, but the prologue to one - and Harry plunges his fingers back into the mess he's made of Eggsy's hair and answers that way instead of words: hauling him closer and holding him there while Eggsy fumbles with Harry's cardigan buttons and kisses him back like it's the end of the world.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from a translation of this poem by Pablo Neruda:
> 
> I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.  
> Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.  
> Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day  
> I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps. 
> 
> I hunger for your sleek laugh,  
> your hands the color of a savage harvest,  
> hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,  
> I want to eat your skin like a whole almond. 
> 
> I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,  
> the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,  
> I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes, 
> 
> and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,  
> hunting for you, for your hot heart,  
> like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.


End file.
